Cody Taylor

Samsung Electronics Co. announced its highest capacity memory card today with twice the storage of previous cards.

Cell phones are moving into more homes and pushing traditional landlines out the door.

Now to be fair, many cell phone makers fail when they are too ambitious, adding cutting-edge features way before their time or taking a design risk. Without these noble failures, perhaps no iPhone would ever have been possible.The phones in our dirty dozen list all suffer from either design flaws or functionality failures, or both.

It would seem that George Orwell might have been more prophetic than we perhaps gave him credit for. Currently, our televisions cannot watch us, but at the rate things are progressing, it is only a matter of time. After all, most PCs now come with web cams and certainly 90% of cell phones.

The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. “Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number … Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. … Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn’t seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It would seem that George Orwell might have been more prophetic than we perhaps gave him credit for. Currently, our televisions cannot watch us, but at the rate things are progressing, it is only a matter of time. After all, most PCs now come with web cams and certainly 90% of cell phones.

Michael J. Ross writes “Two decades ago, Web usage was limited to a single individual (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) using the only browser in existence (WorldWideWeb) running on a single platform (a NeXT Computer). Nowadays, billions of people access the Web daily, with the ability to choose from over a dozen browsers running on desktop computers, laptops, and a variety of mobile devices, such as cell phones. The number of possible combinations is growing rapidly, and makes it increasingly difficult for Web designers and developers to craft their sites so as to be universally accessible. This is particularly true when accounting for Web users with physical and cognitive disabilities — especially if they do not have access to assistive technologies. The challenges and solutions for anyone creating an accessible website are addressed in Universal Design for Web Applications, authored by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May.” Keep reading for the rest of Michael and Laura’s review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever find yourself with a water-soaked low-battery phone? Sharp and Japanese network KDDI have a solution: the world’s first solar-powered waterproof cell phone.

Charting the future of cell phone technology, Kyocera recently unveiled a kinetic energy-powered phone that is capable of folding up like a wallet. Designed by industrial designer Susan McKinney, the EOS phone consists of a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounding a flexible low-energy OLED display.

President Obama on Monday unveiled a plan that will allow U.S. residents to send cell phones, computers, satellite receivers, and more to friends and family in Cuba, and also allow U.S. telecom companies to do business in the country.